The following is the language approved by the City Council on March 17.
After being turned away from other coastal cities, Willa and Charles Bruce purchased property along The Strand in Manhattan Beach to create a beach resort for the area’s Black community on February 19, 1912. By 1916, the resort known as “Bruce’s Beach,” was a thriving fixture for visiting Blacks, with a restaurant, dancehall, changing rooms, and showers.
Soon after, several other Black families purchased property and built homes in the area where this park is now, including Major George Prioleau and Mrs. Ethel Prioleau, Elizabeth Patterson, Mary R. Sanders, Milton and Anna Johnson, John McCaskill and Elzia L. Irvin, and James and Lulu Slaughter.
Unfortunately, not everyone in Manhattan Beach welcomed the Bruces’ enterprise and its crowds of Black patrons in that era of Jim Crow and racial segregation.
The Bruces, their patrons, and the other Black property owners in the area faced harassment, intimidation, and discrimination by some, including City Hall. The purpose of these actions was to make Manhattan Beach inhospitable to Black residents and visitors.
Enough White residents ultimately pressured the City Council to exercise its power of eminent domain to acquire the land for use as a public park. The City condemned the properties of the Bruces, Prioleaus, Johnsons, Patterson, and Sanders. Twenty five White-owned properties that sat undeveloped among the Black-owned properties were condemned as well.
The City’s action at the time was racially motivated and wrong. Today, the City acknowledges, empathizes, and condemns those past actions. We are not the Manhattan Beach of one hundred years ago. We reject racism, hate, intolerance, and exclusion. This park is named in memory of Bruce’s Beach and in recognition of Manhattan Beach’s next one hundred years as a city of respect and inclusion. ER
